Jacob Needleman on Consciousness & Our Future

In his upcoming book An Unknown World: Notes on the Meaning of the Earth, Jacob Needleman discusses “an entirely new kind of relationship between consciousness and nature, between consciousness and the earth, between consciousness and the human body here, now, in our lives.

What Descartes is showing us is something dramatically different from how he has been interpreted: He is showing us that in the capacity of the mind to concentrate its attention toward itself in pure thought—in that capacity there is a central element of Man that is not merely separate from nature, but beyond nature! Beyond earth!

What Descartes is offering is not more or less than the idea of the holy spirit expressed not in religious language, but in the language of the independent human mind, the aspect of man that is, in inception, in its embryonic form, beyond the created world of nature, beyond the earth.”